


Penultimate

by Fleshwerks



Series: Tantalus in Phlegethon [4]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, break-up, sort of that is... more like tying up loose ends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-26
Updated: 2017-01-26
Packaged: 2018-09-20 01:28:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9469415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fleshwerks/pseuds/Fleshwerks
Summary: It's been some time since Zevran realised that the once happy relationship is beyond repairing, and left the Grey Warden. The Grey Warden came back. He shouldn't have.





	

It was _worse._ No matter how hard he had tried to prime himself for this meeting, no matter how manically he’d try to convince that old feelings wouldn’t interfere, the madness mantra had counted for nothing, so here he stood, leaning against the wall, arms crossed and eyes cast down like a sulky child. And the leader of the Antivan Crows just sat there, looking tired and strangely old. There were meters between them but to Lea they might as well been whole worlds away from each other. Regardless, this needed doing.  
  
 _No,_ Zevran said simply after a long silence.  
  
 _No?_ Lea repeated and unfolded his arms, pushing away from the wall.   
  
_You’re forgetting who put you where you are, Zevran,_ he said. _You’d be dead a decade if it wasn’t for me. You were happy to strike from my shadow. I gave you purpose. I took you in when you were a wretch and I remade you._ He said it with a calm, measured tone as if he was reading facts out of a book, but at least the crow deigned to look him in the face now.  
  
 _And that somehow obliges me to jump every time you crack your whip, does it?_ Zevran said. There was none of that playfulness in his voice, none of the warm sun he’d associated with it. Zevran rose and walked up to Lea, stopping a feet from him.  
  
 _What is this, Warden? Some vengeance you’re exacting on me? You had the Crows, all you needed to do was to send a polite message. Instead you are standing here, in person, making threats and yanking the leash._ His words were quick and dark, and true.  
  
Upon Lea’s silence, the crow continued.  
  
 _So it is, then._ He leaned a little bit closer, nailing the Warden to the wall with his cold gaze. _I’m inclined to break this pact of ours. I lived years under a cruel master who thought me a tool and nothing more. Don’t feel so hot on dancing to the drums of another of his like._ He leaned back a bit to contemplate the Warden, and the furrows between his brows softened a little.  
  
 _And you look like you’ll be dead in a few years anyway.  
  
_ What the fuck, Leandaros thought. His stomach sank. Did it really show this much? For some time he had tried to ignore how much hair got caught in his comb, and how the blue under his eyes seemed to have become a permanent feature, and how the all too familiar song had begun to haunt him again after a brief silence from the nightmarish tune the corrupted priest of Dumat had sung to all of the Grey Wardens of Thedas. The dying had begun. Zevran was right. And Zevran _waited for it._ His mouth fell open and glazed eyes widened.   
  
_That may be,_ he finally managed, though he wanted to curl up as if having been kicked in the gut. _But I might just see the ascension of a new Guildmaster before I go. It’s so funny that a pack of crows is called a murder._ Inside, the Warden cringed and beat himself with fists, but it’s how it had always been: his words had a will of their own, and that will was fucking stupid. He searched the silent elf’s face for an answer, but the assassin only sighed, and shook his head as he turned away.  
  
 _You do what you’ve got to do,_ Zevran resigned. He paced around the few times, hands clasped behind his back, occasionally shaking his head at some inner conversation he had with himself.  
  
 _You won’t have the Crows. You won’t have anyone in Antiva if I can help it,_ Zevran said, still pacing, angry, disappointed, letting emotions bleed through the cracks in his armour.  
  
Suddenly, he stopped, and looked the Warden in the eye.  
  
 _What happened to you?_ He said, and walked a little closer, arms slack to the side, some kind of plea in his sudden exhalation and dropping shoulders.  
  
 _You were always a bit broken, but never vengeful. Never thirsting for others’ blood to feel less afraid and powerless, and now you’re here with your manipulation and petty power plays like some angry child.  
_ Zevran sighed angrily, more at himself than the Warden. There was this thing that he’d learned to do since he was still a child. Any worm of doubt, anger, sadness or fear that had ever gnawed at his heart he’d pull out, bottle up and store away, and there would’ve been peace and calm. He’d done that when the beloved Warden had descended to madness, the Blight singing into one ear, the damned demon in him whispering into the other. He’d done so again when he left him for good when he knew that some things, once broken, cannot be repaired. And now the Grey Warden had come and taken a hammer to all of these bottles, and the feelings in them had never died or dried up. They’d grown, deformed, and they ached for a release.  
 _  
You used to be…_ the crow’s glance bounced off the walls as if suitable words were written on them. _You used to be so much_ _ **more.**_ _  
  
_Lea stood perfectly still, silent, eyes wide open and dull, and listened as if the crow was speaking from somewhere far away. He wasn’t sure if he even understood his words. His gaze didn’t follow Zevran to the door.  
  
 _I loved you for many things, and always will for giving me a life worth living and I hope it brings some colour to that black, rotten heart of yours. But you will not use our history to manipulate me, or take that life from me. Death take you and give you peace. You deserve both._  
  
Lea Surana didn’t know if those last words were imagined. Too softly spoken to belong to the furious elf no longer in the room. Too tender. The Warden felt a sudden urge to vomit.  
  
\------  
  
Lea stumbled forward, rushing to the ajar window, threw it open and leaned out in a mess of retching, wracking coughs and a flood of tears, whether from the gagging or the sheer release of pent-up shock, and he cried and retched some more, though to no avail -  he could swear between the ragged breaths and noises that this sickness will choke the life from him here and now. The crow wanted him dead. He said it, words as clear as day. They wanted each other dead. No, did not. He’d just said it to Zevran to hurt him. Shouldn’t have said it. Would’ve not learned the awful truth.   
  
His body exhausted itself quickly, and when he finally sunk to the floor, it felt like there were no bones in his body, no neck that could carry his heavy head. Where thoughts had raced and burned moments ago, their passageways were now filled with lead. Eyes so swollen it was hard to see. There was no breathing through the dripping nose, only through the dry mouth, so he did, jaw slack and breaths shallow as Lea Surana came down.  
  
And when the churning in his stomach calmed and the rivers of tears on his face dried up, he slackened in defeat. Then a new feeling arose. Helpless anger. His once-lover had called his bluff. He knew he wouldn’t do it, that he couldn’t. And all of his life Lea Surana had thought of himself as unstoppable, unwilling to stop at nothing, and no one. Yet there the crow was, standing indifferently on his way, unmoving, and Lea couldn’t bring himself to remove him from his path.  
  
Zevran would be waiting for the axe to fall, and know of the Warden’s weakness when death never came. In a fraction of a moment Lea had lost any hold he had had over the Antivan Crows, and the entirety of Antiva with it. This was Fort Drakon all over again. One display of weakness, one mistake, and everything he’d worked for, killed for, almost died for, came crashing down around him without the mercy of taking him with it. No, it taunted. A string of failures where it had mattered the most. History cast the Warden aside and made him watch as it marched on like he never even existed.  
  
Lea caught himself running around his head, pointing fingers, blaming. Just like he had when he was fresh out of Kinloch in a world he didn’t know. When he’d felt scared, vulnerable, stupid, powerless. Before he learned that his fate, his story, the entire world was clay in his hands, and how powerful it had felt to seize it, to shape it, and to take the blame for his failures and stand up again more clever, more determined after each fall, knowing he was still loved despite the imperfection of himself and the fabric of history he wove. What had happened? Where had that part of him gone? Or had he always been this wretched, only held aloft by sheer demented willpower and lies to oneself? It felt strange to watch this little man scream and wave its tiny fists in futile anger. Watching himself from above with some strange newfound calm that he’d never known before. Watching himself wallow to the black heart’s content, and be a child and spew his bile.   
  
And feel no anger or disappointment or shame in the little, miserable man who cried and blamed and who was weak and useless, from whose mouth black poison snakes slithered out to some unknown beyond, until he was clean and pink and empty, with spindly and trembling limbs, uncovered and free from the opulent gold he’d always drape himself in. In his new mind’s eye he silently looked upon his small and withered self as if through divine, all-seeing eyes, and he himself looked back in trepidation, unsure of what to think of these new eyes, and the profound void in places where glory and love had been, where a sea of poison and twisted will had once lapped surely, steadily at them, wearing them away slowly but inexorably. All gone.  
  
Just him, alone with God.  
  
He gathered some of the cloth of his robe and wiped his face with it, and sat a little longer, idly brushing through his hair with his fingers and contemplating thin clumps of long black hairs that fell away from his head. His hair had been his crown and his shroud, and he’d been so afraid of losing it. But somehow it mattered less, for they had been as heavy to bear as any crown and cloak, and he looked forward to be free of their weight.   
  
Death could wait. Lea Surana still had work to do, and the thought of it filled all these empty, scoured spaces in him like water, clear and cold, washing away the last of the scum of the fetid, rotten swamp that had filled him before.  
  


 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> You reap what you sow, Lea Surana. No, a lot of what happened wasn't his fault. But a lot of it was, and with these threats he buried himself in the grave he'd been digging.
> 
> It was 5am, I was a bit hungover and a bit :(, so this happened.


End file.
